'Groundbreaking' Mulvoy set to accept Elmer Ferguson Memorial Award

Mark Mulvoy has about 650 children, 654 if you include the four he had with Trish, his wife of 55 years. Eighteen of those offspring are displayed in frames on the wall in his home office in Rye, New York, with dozens more in a souvenir album he cherishes at his other home in Vero Beach, Florida.

The autographed Sports Illustrated covers feature some of the greatest athletes in hockey, including Gordie Howe, Bobby Orr, Wayne Gretzky, Rod Gilbert, Ken Dryden and the 1980 U.S. men's hockey team, which won the gold medal at the Lake Placid Olympics. They hang among those of baseball's Carl Yastrzemski and Tom Seaver, golf's Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus, basketball's John Havlicek and Larry Bird, football's Doug Flutie, and a handful of the magazine's swimsuit editions.

Mulvoy, 82, will mention some of these names, and many others, on Nov. 13 at the Hockey Hall of Fame NHL Media Awards Luncheon in Toronto, where he will accept the Professional Hockey Writers' Association's 2023 Elmer Ferguson Memorial Award for excellence in hockey journalism.

Named for the late, legendary Montreal newspaper columnist, the award was first presented in 1984 by the PHWA to recognize members of the hockey-writing community whose work has brought honor to journalism and the game they cover.

Mark Mulvoy in the early 1990s in front of a display of 1992 Sports Illustrated covers, and in 1972 in Moscow's Red Square, in front of Vladimir Lenin's Tomb.

Mulvoy has left a strong footprint with his reporting and analysis since the early 1960s, beginning with his hometown Boston Globe. He was hired by Sports Illustrated on April 1, 1965, covering hockey, baseball, golf and professional football through late 1977, when he was named senior editor of the magazine.

A graduate of Boston College, Mulvoy would perform a number of roles for Sports Illustrated, including writer, senior editor, editor-in-chief and publisher, before he retired following the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.

In 1984, he was named the fifth and youngest editor in the magazine's history. Mulvoy would direct coverage of news, events and important issues through Sports Illustrated's superb writing, exhaustive investigative reporting and brilliant photography, winning the National Magazine Award as magazine of the year in 1988 and 1989.

He wrote 12 books from 1967-80, including co-authoring two hockey titles: "Bobby Orr: My Game," which came out in 1974 and is equal parts autobiography and instruction manual, and "Face-Off at the Summit," which came out in 1973 and provides a revealing look through Dryden's eyes at the historic 1972 Summit Series.

Mark Mulvoy's books written with Ken Dryden in 1973 and Bobby Orr in 1974.

"I created 650 issues of the magazine," Mulvoy said of Sports Illustrated, an expectant father of sorts when the weekly was put to bed and hit the presses, soon to be shipped globally to 3.3 million insatiable subscribers and to newsstands for single-copy sale.

"Mark Mulvoy was a groundbreaking reporter as the first foreigner given access behind enemy lines to lift the curtain on the Soviet style of play," PHWA president Frank Seravalli said when he announced the 2023 Ferguson award in June.

"Mulvoy had boots on the ground in Moscow a handful of years before the '72 Summit Series, then of course was there to chronicle history. More importantly, he kept hockey in the hands and doctor's offices of the voracious Sports Illustrated readers. He was hockey's best friend at a time of critical period of growth for the sport."

Mulvoy ghostwrote for Nicklaus in Sports Illustrated from 1965 through about 1971, and he actually became an excellent player himself, golfing with the best in the game, U.S. presidents and captains of industry. He also competed in the 1999 U.S. Senior Amateur Championship.

Mulvoy created the Golf Plus insert that was delivered to 600,000 golf-hungry SI readers, brought to life SI for Kids, a stand-alone magazine for young readers, and turned SI's annual Swimsuit Issue from a small story into an annual special edition that sold 5 million copies and often made more money by itself than its sister publication TIME Magazine did all year.

Mark Mulvoy presenting Bobby Orr with Sports Illustrated's 1970 Sportsman of the Year award, and golfing in 1995 with former U.S. President Bill Clinton at the Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland.

Sports Illustrated's bottom line more than quadrupled during his years as managing editor, with Mulvoy hiring and developing some of sportswriting's greatest talent.

And he covered a great deal of hockey himself, having first occasionally filled in for legendary Boston Globe writer Tom Fitzgerald on the Bruins beat in the early 1960s.

"When I joined the magazine in 1965, there was very little hockey in its pages. It was such a minor event for SI," he recalled, though that would change dramatically when he was named the magazine's hockey writer in 1967, when the NHL expanded from six teams to 12.

Mulvoy's 2,000-word profile on Guy Lafleur on March 1, 1971, was a landmark portrait of the future superstar a few months before he was chosen by the Montreal Canadiens with the No. 1 pick in the 1971 NHL Amateur Draft.

It was Mulvoy who gave Canadiens forward Yvan Cournoyer his nickname "Roadrunner" for the fleet cartoon bird, Cournoyer joking at the time that now he had to live up to the label.

It was the Summit Series, though, which took place between an NHL all-star team from Canada and a squad from Russia across eight games in September of 1972 -- which was supposed to be a rout for Canada that instead came down to a nail-biting finish in Moscow -- that remains the greatest event to Mulvoy among the many hundreds he covered across the spectrum of sports.

"I'd seen Nicklaus at Augusta, the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, a great day of track and field at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, 10 world records broken in one day," Mulvoy said. "But the Summit Series was magical in every way. Kids being let out of school, TVs wheeled into classrooms, the emotion of it ..."

Bobby Orr on the May 4, 1970, cover of Sports Illustrated, and with Mark Mulvoy following the Bruins' 1972 Stanley Cup win.

Mulvoy speaks of countless pinch-me moments, from the days of his youth when a Boston Garden usher would let kids in for a sprint up to the balcony -- "the heavens," as he calls it -- where they'd sit in the aisles for 90 minutes before face-off, reading The Hockey News.

There isn't a hockey legend from the late 1940s through today who he hasn't covered or watched, though he singled out Bruins icon Eddie Shore, who played in the NHL from 1926-40, as the one he'd loved to have seen play.

In accepting the Elmer Ferguson Memorial Award, Mulvoy will speak of professional relationships forged and lifelong friendships made, of sitting in the den of the legendary Jean Beliveau to watch a Super Bowl.

"Jean was the classiest athlete I've ever met," he said. "Is there anyone classier, more respected, more revered than Jean Beliveau? Is there one blemish on his record anywhere?"

And Mulvoy will speak of hockey reporting in his day, very different around-the-clock access to everyone in the game, flying with teams, sitting with a notebook in the hotel room of a player, of a time "when we just went and did our stories."

He might mention that the cover date of the first issue of Sports Illustrated, a cornerstone in his life, was August 16, 1954. That was Mulvoy's 13th birthday, and if he wasn't a reader of the magazine then, in time he would become that and a great deal more.

Top photo: Mark Mulvoy photographed at the John's Island Club in Vero Beach, Florida on Oct. 27, 2023.